The world's leading luxury and upscale hotels, resorts, cruise lines, vacation destinations, and other public venues often differentiate themselves in a competitive market by promising and attempting to deliver exceptional service and convenience to their patrons, such as guests, customers, spectators, visitors, clientele, and other clients (hereinafter referred to collectively as “patrons”). Successfully delivering on the promise of outstanding service not only attracts repeat business, but can also generate greater revenue and increased profitability. At the same time, patrons that these properties attract have elevated expectations of service, including increased levels of attention, convenience, speed and control. The service delivery challenge for the resort is to attend quickly to patrons when the require service, to fulfill patrons' requests in a timely and efficient manner, and finally to locate a patron for delivery of their order.
Despite their high expectations, patrons at luxury and upscale resorts currently face several inconveniences in ordering food, beverages, and other amenities and services while on the beach, at the pool and in other areas of the property. In many instances when patrons desire to place an order, they cannot find a staff member such as a server, a runner, a waiter, a waitress, beach attendant, recreational staff, an employee and other personnel (hereinafter referred to collectively as a “staff member”) of an establishment in the vicinity. Often the patron is unable to attract the attention of the staff member, or the staff member may be busy attending to another patron. Additional problems arise once the order is taken, as the staff member may proceed to take additional orders before submitting initial patron's orders for fulfillment. The result is a delay in entering the initial orders to the resort's computer system (assuming there is a basic computer system) and thus delaying preparation of the order as well.
If a patron becomes tired of waiting for a staff member to take the order, the alternative is to walk, sometimes for great distances, to place an order for food, beverages, or services. Not only are patrons inconvenienced, but they also face the risks inherent in leaving children or personal belongings unsupervised and unprotected on the beach, pool deck, or other resort location.
Once the order is prepared and ready for delivery to the patron, it can be a challenge for the staff member to remember where the patron is located or to find where the patron has relocated. Oftentimes the person who took the order is often not the same person who delivers the order, or the patron has moved and is not seated where the original order was taken. The result is that patrons experience further delay in having their orders delivered.
Once a the item (such as a towel, beverage, food) has been delivered to the patron, and the staff member departs, any problem with the order (i.e., missing utensils or condiments, erroneous or ill-prepared items, etc.) requires the patron to chase after the staff member, walk to a service area, or wait for the staff member to return.
Additionally, since a staff member has no way to know if a patron is interested in ordering food or beverages, staff members may periodically “check-in” with the patron as they circulate on the beach, pool, or other locations, which sometimes results in annoying disturbances for the patron, if the patron has no interest in placing an order.
Furthermore, most resorts do not offer patrons the ability to purchase sundry items, reserve a tee time, tennis court, jet ski, or spa related appointments while seated at the beach or pool.
In an attempt to address some of the aforementioned problems, a limited number of hotels are deploying centrally-located kiosks. Unfortunately, these systems require patrons to leave their seats and walk some distance to place an order at a kiosk location. Again, not only are the patrons inconvenienced, but they also face the risks inherent in leaving children or personal belongings unsupervised and unprotected on the beach, pool deck, or other resort location when having to order from the kiosk location.
Additionally, kiosks do not enable the staff member to locate the patron for delivery of the order, thus requiring additional effort and further inconvenience to the patron if the patron must retrieve the order himself. Furthermore, in many instances there may be a line of patrons waiting to use a particular kiosk creating a further inconvenient experience for patrons when they attempt to place an order for themselves.
Some manufactures have introduced POS (point-of-sale) systems for use by staff at restaurants, which may include wireless handheld terminals, as an extension of the POS systems. These handheld terminals enable staff to input and manage patron orders at a distance. Unfortunately, these devices typically only allow the staff member, to take and transmit the order on behalf of the patron. The patron must still wait for a staff member to arrive so that the patron may initiate an order. Additionally, these systems do not lend themselves in many areas of a resort. For example, there remains the problem of locating the patron in a pool or beach environment after the order is taken. This problem is further exacerbated when the staff member who took the order is not the same person who delivers the order. Thus, centrally-located kiosks for patron use and handheld POS devices for a staff member's use, both are of limited effectiveness and, thus do not fully address the problems of both the patron and the resort.
The impact on the resort caused by these service failures is significant, and includes decreased patron satisfaction, higher costs through service inefficiencies, and missed opportunities to increase property revenues per patron, decreased repeat patron business, and decreased reputation/rating, etc.